I owe Roo. Big time.

I have an amazing wife. Not a question or opinion but fact. I’m a city boy, born and raised in Illinois that converted a small town girl living in a Friday Night Lights world into a full-fledged diehard Chicago Bears fan. So much a great fan that she bought a Bears flag to replace (temporarily) the South Carolina state flag that hangs outside our front door. So much a great wife that for the biggest game for the Chicago Bears in the past 25 years and she was able to get us tickets, the hottest tickets in town in the past 25 years, less than 72 hours before kickoff.

She topped it all off by booking a “free” stay thanks to hotel points; our last minute surprisingly cheap flight came with a free first-class upgrade thanks to her frequent flyer status. Given I write this from my couch and not one of the hundred various Hilton or Marriot properties in the greater Dallas-Fort Worth area, the game obviously didn’t go as we would have hoped. But the jet-setter weekend trip to the Windy City was worthy of awarding Riley with Wife of the Year honors in only the third week of January. Arriving on gameday eve, we ate our way through Saturday with the help of Graham Elliot’s Grahamwich and a Girl and the Goat’s roasted pigface.

An added bonus at the Palmer House was that our brief stay coincided with 2011 Soxfest. Now I bleed Cubbie Blue but my cousin Amberly and family were in town from South Bend to let son and dieheard Southsider Sam take in the festivities. So we were able to meet them for Sunday brunch before setting out into the bitter cold.

The key to surviving a Chicago winter is layering and we did just that on Sunday. But even with hand and feet warms placed at all extremities, the cold crept in. Roo was a trooper though, sticking it out from start to finish, complaining only about the numbers on the scoreboard not the ones on the thermometer.

The game came and went, drive after drive of coming so close yet so far away and ended sans the spectacular roar with which it began.

We finished off the day with a deep dish at Giordano’s and Starbucks hot chocolate for desert. The next morning we returned South and I’ve been mourning the Bears season ever since. I will no doubt be pulling for the Steelers today and of course looking forward to the commercials…though, I think I (and12 million other viewers as of 12:42) have already seen the best commercial of the year, if not ever…